BAD HOMBURG. Emotions play a decisive role in shaping the political culture of democracy. Israeli-French sociologist Eva Illouz has explored in several widely discussed works - including The Emotional Life of Populism: How Fear, Disgust, Resentment, and Love Undermine Democracy and Explosive Emotions: How Modern Society Shapes What We Feel - how fear, resentment, anxiety, disgust, and love emerge from social conditions and influence democracy. In her keynote at the joint annual workshop of the new German Research Foundation (DFG) Research Training Group "Aesthetics of Democracy" and Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften's research focus "Democratic Vistas", she revisits this subject - this time with a focus on an emotion that sparks particularly intense debate in Germany: guilt.
In her English-language lecture, "Is Guilt Good for Democracy?", Illouz retraces the cultural and historical processes through which guilt has become a central emotion in the self-conception of liberal democracies since the 1980s. She explores the normative and political implications of this transformation and asks whether guilt acts as a productive or inhibiting force in democratic societies. The lecture will take place
on Friday, April 24, 7 p.m.
at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften Institute for Advanced Studies
Am Wingertsberg 4
in Bad Homburg.
Prof. Johannes Völz, spokesperson for the Research Training Group and co-spokesperson of "Democratic Vistas," will introduce the topic.
Eva Illouz is a professor of sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and director of studies at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris. She has published numerous books on the sociology of emotions, consumer capitalism, and modern culture. For her work, she was awarded the Frank Schirrmacher Prize 2024, the Aby Warburg Prize 2024, and the EMET Prize for Social Sciences, among others. Latest book publications: The Emotional Life of Populism. How Fear, Disgust, Resentment, and Love Undermine Democracy (Polity Press, 2023), Der 8. Oktober. Über die Ursprünge des neuen Antisemitismus (in German, Suhrkamp, 2025), and Explosive Emotions. How Modern Society Shapes What We Feel (Princeton University Press, 2026).
